


Carve me in marble, cast me in gold

by chaila



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-15
Updated: 2010-07-15
Packaged: 2017-10-11 13:06:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/112724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaila/pseuds/chaila
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Terissa's nightmares always start and end the same way. They start with Sarah Connor and they end with death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carve me in marble, cast me in gold

**Author's Note:**

> Written for femgenficathon 2010. Originally posted [here](http://community.livejournal.com/femgenficathon/100410.html) on LJ.
> 
> Prompts:
> 
> 13) If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down, these women together ought to be able to turn it right side up again. -- Sojourner Truth (1797 – November 26, 1883), African-American abolitionist, women's rights activist, advocate for prison reform, anti-capital punishment activist, lecturer and saint of the Episcopal Church.
> 
> 120)  
> You and I  
> Have so much love,  
> That it  
> Burns like a fire,  
> In which we bake a lump of clay  
> Molded into a figure of you  
> And a figure of me.  
> Then we take both of them,  
> And break them into pieces,  
> And mix the pieces with water,  
> And mold again a figure of you,  
> And a figure of me.  
> I am in your clay.  
> You are in my clay.  
> \-- Kuan Tao-Sheng (1262-1319), Chinese painter, calligrapher and poet of the Yuan Dynasty.

Terissa's nightmares always start and end the same way. They start with Sarah Connor and they end with death. Their predictability does not mute their horror. Many of the other details vary throughout the years. Sometimes Sarah calmly knocks on the door, sometimes she barrels through it with guns blazing, and sometimes she simply appears from nowhere. Sometimes the machines are large muscle-bound men, ludicrous parodies of human masculinity and strength. Sometimes they are lithe young girls, no less lethal for the lack of visible signs of power. Sometimes they forgo the facade of flesh entirely, metal limbs glinting in the sun, red eyes gleaming. Sometimes there is only one and sometimes there are thousands, lined up in orderly advancing rows. Sometimes she dreams Miles back to life only to watch him die again, sometimes she dies, and sometimes she screams wordlessly as Danny dies. Sometimes the whole world seems to collapse into itself and die all at once. There is never any aftermath in her dreams. They always end abruptly with the death. And they always start with Sarah.

The nightmares began the night Miles left with Sarah and did not return, or, rather, the first night after Sarah that Terissa was able to sleep. Though they come and go with varying degrees of frequency over the next ten years, once they start, they never really stop.

***

On the first of his many visits, FBI Agent James Ellison, lead investigator of the murder of Miles Dyson, says Sarah was delusional and disturbed. "Paranoid schizophrenic," he says authoritatively. "Miles was already wounded," he tells Terissa more gently. "She shot him before we got there. He was still inside the building when she blew it up." He's a little too arrogant, as they all are, but he goes out of his way to look her in the eye when he says he's sorry for her loss.

Terissa tells him very little. He asks a lot of questions but none are the right ones. She wouldn't answer them anyway. She can't tell him about the machine, about the calm way it peeled back the flesh of its arm to reveal the metal frame underneath, or the terrifying matter-of-fact tone in its inhuman voice when it described the terrible things Miles would be responsible for.

Instead, she tells Agent Ellison about Sarah. Once she starts, she finds that the details pour out. It's not exactly a safe topic but at least she doesn't have to lie. She describes Sarah's relentless insistence that machines from the future were coming to destroy the world; her single-minded belief that she had to stop it; the way her hand never really strayed from the gun at her hip or back, as if magnetized; the unhinged, bottled anger in her every word and move; the troubling way she had molded her young son into believing her, following her, taking care of her; the determined but unreadable look in her eyes when she left with Miles.

Like cyborgs from the future, the very idea of Sarah Connor is unimaginable until you've seen it yourself, so Terissa knows how this sounds to the agent, who has seen nothing of what she has. When he leaves her house that first time with his own determined look, his head undoubtedly almost as full of Sarah as hers, but with very little of the surrounding truths, she feels a little sorry for him.

That night, she dreams of Sarah. She wakes up screaming in a cold sweat, Danny in the doorway staring with wide eyes.

***

Despite the official position of the FBI, the entire United States government, and every single agent who questions her, on most days Terissa believes that Sarah didn't kill Miles by her own hand. It's a comforting belief on those occasional days it feels vitally important but most of the time, it hardly seems to matter. All Terissa knows is that the last thing Sarah said was that they needed to destroy everything, every last part, and then she had. Or maybe the machine had said it. The two blend together in Terissa's memory.

When Sarah shows up on her doorstep again two years later, the fierce rush of anger overshadows her disbelief in the FBI's official narrative. The only possible reason for Sarah to be there is that it isn't over. For Terissa, whether or not Sarah is a murderer depends a great deal on whether she is a liar.

Sarah had sworn there'd be no more machines, that stopping Miles' work would stop it all. But she and John have another one with them, a girl this time, with electric blue eyes hidden behind her almost-human brown ones. It is enough to make Terissa disbelieve everything Sarah ever promised her. In that moment she has no doubt that Sarah Connor murdered her husband, whether she pulled the trigger or not.

"Miles was a hero," Sarah swears. Terissa desperately wants to be convinced but Sarah's hand is hard and cold on hers and the girl says that they have to go. Another machine is coming.

Terissa watches Sarah, John and the girl drive off in her car. The second robot gives chase, one machine speeding after the other. Some contraption of theirs explodes, sending the second machine flying. Terissa trembles behind her window blinds as it picks itself up off the ground like it had simply tripped. Her hands shake where she has them pressed against her mouth, as if it will hear her and turn, but it does not. As Sarah had promised, it follows the path the Connors had taken away from the house, away from Terissa and her son.

The next day, Sarah Connor blows herself and her son up in a bank with Terissa's car in the parking lot. Terissa shuts off the news. "Your father was a hero," she tells her son and he is still young enough to believe her.

***

Agent Ellison returns, of course, because an exploding pick-up truck is hard to disguise and cars in parking lots are easy to trace. She lets him in and remembers that he takes his coffee black.

"We believe that Sarah Connor is dead," he says. She detects a little of her own disbelief in that fact in his voice, despite the news replaying the footage of the exploding bank on endless loop. His arrogance is mostly gone. He seems to want to convince her.

"You believe," she says, but not unkindly.

"We recently traced her to Nebraska and then to New Mexico," he explains. "Then here. Then she broke into a bank in the city. There was an explosion."

"She blew herself up," Terissa finishes when he hesitates. "I saw the news, Agent. You didn't have to come all the way here to tell me that," she says like she believes consideration for her is why he's here. She can't tell how much he knows or suspects.

She leaves very little out of the story but tells him even less than she ever has before. "She just knocked on the door. She said there were more machines. She said Miles' death hadn't stopped them. She said one was after her now. She wasn't making any sense. She wanted my car and she had a gun, so I let her take it," Terissa explains in clipped sentences, all of it true. "It wasn't a social visit."

"Did she threaten you?"

"No."

"And why the explosion here?"

"I wouldn't know. Habit, maybe. She never leaves quietly." It's not really a joke.

"You saw nothing else? Nobody chasing her?"

"No," Terissa answers, looking him in the eye and telling the first outright lie. "Nothing."

He doesn't respond. He twirls his coffee cup. "Mrs. Dyson, did she ask for your help?"

It's a strange question for a cop chasing a murderer to ask the victim's widow. "Sarah Connor killed my husband," she tells him, "why would she expect my help?"

He doesn't have an answer. Neither does she. "I have to close the case," he says after a long silence. "Sarah Connor is dead. I really am sorry. For everything." She nods an acknowledgment. His steps are heavy and resigned as she leads him through the living room and out the front door.

"Yes," she says to the empty room, her husband's picture smiling down from the mantel. "Sarah Connor is dead," she repeats, wondering if he believes it. Wondering if she believes it. She feels unprotected, and slightly panicked. She wonders if the nightmares will stop now, if Sarah is dead, but they get worse.

***

Sarah is dead for a long time, long enough for Danny to stop asking questions, for the gray to creep into Terissa's hair and for the dreams to fade into more occasional occurrences. But when she appears again out of thin air next to Miles' grave, looking as she always has, not dead and wanting something, Terissa isn't startled at all. Sarah remembers the date and brings a yellow rose to lay on the gravestone. She hasn't aged a day. Terissa doubts that fighting killer machines keeps one young, but she asks no questions. She doesn't want to know. She has enough to dream about and Sarah wouldn't tell her anyway.

Terissa asks after John, asks after the second machine, the bad one, and sits beside her husband's grave with Sarah and signs Andy Goode's death certificate. She lies the first time she flips past Andy's picture in the stack Sarah hands her and says she recognizes no one. He looks so young, too young. The finality in Sarah's voice as she says she'll leave Terissa alone makes her call Sarah back with the truth. Terissa has no idea if Sarah is winning this war she says she's fighting, but Terissa can't fathom what happens if she loses.

After that day, Terissa scans the obituaries daily. It's not long before she reads Andy's. She convinces herself that she is surprised.

***

Later that year, she files a missing person's report as soon she learns from Danny's roommate that he hasn't been home in days and left no indication as to where he was going. The LAPD promises to keep her updated on the investigation but there is no urgency in their response. Danny is of age, just over 18, and his relationship with Terissa has not exactly been untroubled in the years since he stopped believing in his father's heroism and began to believe he was simply dead. There is no evidence of foul play, other than Terissa's insistence.

When she calls the FBI, they tell her it's not a federal matter, a euphemism, she thinks, for "unimportant." She knows she could make it a high priority domestic terrorism case with just a few words. She goes so far as to call and ask for Agent Ellison, but they tell her he's left the bureau. She hangs up. She could tell a different agent about Sarah and make a brand new star, but she's not sure Sarah in jail would solve a thing, even if she did have something to do with Danny's disappearance.

When she receives a phone call from Danny after he's been gone for four weeks, it's hurried and anxious, but he says nothing about force, nothing about kidnapping. His brief, "Mom, it's me. I'm fine. I love you," is both all she needs to hear and painfully devoid of information. The only reply to her questions about his whereabouts is a dial tone. She reports the call immediately to the investigators. "He wouldn't do this," she insists, "he wouldn't refuse to tell me where he is unless someone wouldn't let him." They listen to her politely and say they'll call.

She has to do something, anything, but they tell her the best thing she can do is wait. She hires a private investigator with her retirement savings. Her reports, though regular, turn up nothing. She begins to pray again for the first time in years. That too turns up nothing.

Two months after the call from Danny, Terissa turns on the television to see Sarah's face once again splashed across the screen as she's led away from a police car in handcuffs. Her stomach drops out--whether from hope or panic, she can't tell--and Danny's voice rings in her ears. When there's a mass breakout from the LA county jail, she nearly cries from what feels a lot like relief. She wonders whether she's more afraid Sarah will come or more afraid that she won't.

For the next few weeks, she keeps her curtains closed and does not watch her street. She visits Miles' grave more often than she has in years, but she tells herself that's natural, with their son missing. The nightmares start coming every time she closes her eyes, as they have not done since the first year after Miles' death. Terissa both recoils from them and clings to them as if they are prophecy.

When she comes it's through the front door. Despite the relief Terissa feels, it's a struggle not to slam it shut. No greeting feels appropriate so she directs her reaction to the second person at the door, whose presence is unexpectedly reassuring.

"Agent Ellison," says Terissa, without a trace of surprise. "They told me you were no longer on the case." She doesn't let them pass, which makes Sarah fidget on the doorstep and glance nervously down the driveway.

"I wouldn't exactly say that," he says wryly over Sarah's shoulder. A little of the old sureness she remembers from their early meetings is back in his voice, though he has the grace to look slightly abashed.

"How long have you known?" she asks conversationally, working to keep her voice steady. She doesn't specify whether she's asking about his knowledge of the machines or his knowledge of Sarah and he doesn't ask for clarification.

"After you," he says, which is probably true, and it's not a reproach.

"We're here about Danny," Sarah breaks in, impatient and to the point, indicating with a tilt of her chin that Agent Ellison should watch the street. "We know he's missing. The machines are using Miles' work. We think whoever Danny's with must believe he knows something about it." She steps aside a little and gestures to Ellison that he should speak. He steps forward to talk to Terissa, taking Sarah's conflicting unspoken directions in stride.

Ellison takes over, quickly explaining his work with someone named Catherine Weaver at a technology corporation. He gives few details about her or the company, talking mostly about some advanced artificial intelligence project they had worked on together which had been built from Miles' work at Cyberdyne. Sarah's mouth visibly tightens when he talks about his plan to teach the machine ethics and the value of human life, but he doesn't dwell on the details and she lets him finish. He explains that there was someone else using the same technology and attempting to sabotage their work.

It is Sarah who tells her that this Catherine Weaver is a machine. "Metal," is what she says, precisely. Terissa turns her head away, feeling sick. It always comes down to this, always, and she is so tired of hearing it. Ellison and Sarah overlap in the rest of the explanation, which Terissa only halfway hears through the blood rushing in her ears, something about some sort of virus. She does not turn her face back to them.

It's Sarah who sums it up. "There are other machines now, other than Skynet. Weaver was using Andy's Goode's work. They're all using Miles' work, Terissa. We don't know what they want."

Terissa gives that no acknowledgment. "Andy Goode?" she asks instead, turning back to look at Sarah's face.

It's Sarah's turn to drop her head, dark hair falling across her eyes briefly before she lifts her eyes to meet Terissa's inquiry. "It wasn't me," she says evenly.

"No," Terissa agrees, "it never is."

"Danny could be in danger," Sarah insists, neither acknowledging nor deflecting the hit. "They could think he's involved. He could have been involved and he didn't even know it."

"Danny doesn't know about any of this," Terissa replies, not thinking about the long hours he spent with his laptop and various equipment she never recognized, not thinking about his planned computer science major. "I couldn't—I didn't see any reason to tell him everything. He was a little boy. He couldn't understand. You said there'd be no more machines. You said it was over. You destroyed it all. You destroyed everything."

"I guess we didn't. We have to do it again." It sounds like every conversation they've ever had and Terissa wants more than anything to close the door and forget everything she knows about it, to forget about the machines and the computers and the deaths and the nightmares.

"You bring them with you," she tells Sarah and there might be a challenge in it.

Sarah visibly flinches, but recovers quickly. "I know. I'm sorry."

Terissa supposes that she really is.

"What about this. . . woman? The other machine?" she asks, directing the question to Ellison. She wonders if she should ask for a picture so she can add a new face to her nightmares.

It's Sarah who answers. "She's gone. We don't know where."

"The girl?" Terissa asks.

"Gone," says Sarah.

"John?"

Sarah pauses. "I don't know."

Terissa contemplates the enormity of that, tries to fit it with what she knows of Sarah. "You think if you find Danny, you'll find John."

"No," Sarah shakes her head. "I think if we find Danny, it'll help John. And Danny. They want something from him. We have to find out what that is."

Terissa is silent for a long moment, still unconvinced. "He's not John," she says finally. "I'm not you. I can't do what you do."

"You lie awake at night," Sarah says and her eyes are hard but it sounds like a confession. "You wonder where your son is, what he's doing or if he's okay. If he's hurt or sick. If he's alive. If he needs you. We need to find him. I know you need to find him. I can find him. But you have to help me." Terissa remembers how dangerously persuasive Sarah has always been in person, with the force of her conviction and her fierce determination, her certainty in her knowledge of what's coming, the sheer threat of her predictions drowning out any individual petty objections. Looking at Sarah alone in the doorway without her son, Terissa can't find a way to say that she's lost too much already, that she doesn't have any more to give.

Terissa doesn't think about the nightmares she's grown accustomed to over the last ten years. She doesn't think about the way this always ends. She thinks about the last time she heard Danny's voice, and Miles', and about the future. "All right," she says, finally opening the door wide and letting Sarah in, "tell me what I can do."


End file.
